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Grease
& Guts
Hangin'
out in the oval world of Cottage Grove.
Story by Nate Puckett
- Photos by James Bateman
It's a gorgeous summer
evening in Cottage Grove, and I'm about to get my ass kicked by some
Pit Guys. Adrenaline — or fear, or something — surges
up from my stomach as I remember the "IMPORTANT NOTICE" posted at
the entrance to the pits: Bodily injury resulting from FIGHTING
amongst race participants is NOT covered by Speedway racing insurance
policy.
What if, I wonder, the violence is strictly one-way?
And press-focused? Are the financial ramifications of a good, old-fashioned
Journalistic Beatdown favorable to my loved ones?
The Pit Guys may know, but it's too late to ask. I
have been glaring at them from across a line of 360 Sprint race cars,
and the time of reckoning is at hand. It will not help, I am sure,
to tell them my glare/squint is most assuredly not of the Clint
Eastwood variety — it's just my contact lenses, fellas, just
dust and exhaust on the ol' pupils making me grimace like a skunked
hound … no, the truth will not fly. It makes me sound like a
target, the sort of sissified city boy who's never been to the Cottage
Grove Speedway and can't even handle a little track atmosphere. All
of which is true.
"Something wrong?" Pit Guy #1 wants to know, taking
a few steps forward and glaring at my notebook. His black T-shirt
appears to have an exploding racecar on the front. It is tight in
the sleeves and collar but loose in the belly.
"I was wondering something about the races," I say,
trying to come up with the rest of my question.
"Yeah?" The three of them are now within violence
range.
"I was wondering," I say slowly, "why anyone
would want to shut this place down." Ooh. This is a cowardly and two-faced
tactic — the words pop out of my mouth before my brain has even
screened them — but it strikes the right chord. The PGs look
at each other and back at me.
"Hell," says #1, "we don't know."
"We don't know shit," clarifies PG #2.
"Oh," I say. "Because — "
"Because it sucks that someone would want to close
this place, huh?" says #1.
"Yeah," I say. "Yeah, it sure does."
On Saturday, Aug. 17, the Cottage Grove Speedway hosted
a bunch of fast, noisy races, much to the delight of the thousand-or-so
people who showed up (843 paid to attend, a relatively low figure
due to the Lane County Fair). From late March through September, about
15 miles south of Eugene, there are races almost every week, sometimes
twice a week. The dirt racetrack, complete with bleachers, has existed
since 1956.
This last fact is one that gets cited continuously
by Speedway aficionados, because they are afraid the racetrack is
going to be shut down. There are disputes regarding building permits
and zoning regulations and environmental impact; judging by the tone
most racegoers used when discussing it, the dispute has become bitter.
Citizens have complained to county officials about the Speedway. Letters
have been published, both pro-Speedway and con. Lawyers, of course,
have become involved.
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A recent ruling by Lane County Planning Director Kent
Howe appears to spell trouble for the Speedway. Because the 17.25
acres of Speedway property are designated for agriculture, grazing
and timber, the legality of Cottage Grove's auto racing scene has
been called into question. But the land wasn't zoned by the county
until 1976, 20 years after the Speedway was founded. A proposal by
its owners to have the property "grandfathered" into city plans was
rejected by Howe, on the basis that numerous expansions and improvements
have been made over the years without permission from the county.
A public hearing has been scheduled for Oct. 3.
Newsy stuff, to be certain. But as they say in Reporting
101, if you have a choice between going to a county meeting or going
to a racetrack … well, start your damn engines.
I hit Cottage Grove (pop. 8,670) around 4 pm, armed
with pen, notebook, and the requisite long-haired photographer to
draw some of the heat. My mindset was not of the wide-open variety;
as we pulled into the dirt parking lot, waved through by some football-tossing
guys in fluorescent orange vests, I already felt on the defensive.
Gaze in awe as the myth of the Objective Journalist takes another
hit: I am not a racing fan.
No, cars don't really do it for me, and a quarter-mile
oval track is for racing on foot, in my opinion. That's a beautiful
sport. Auto racing is barely a sport at all. Such were the sort of
cranky notions that filled my head as I approached the pits.
The pits are where the cars go when they're not racing.
It's where tinkering is done and boasts are spouted and cigarettes
are smoked. It's where cars line up to enter the track and where they
are towed if they crash during a race — just a glorified dirt
parking lot, really, but for the hours leading up to race time, it's
where the action is.
Brad Kocks, a 33-year-old Springfield resident and
serious gearhead, doesn't race cars. He builds 'em, and makes sure
they stay in peak condition for his brother Jason, who does the driving.
(There is a marked clannish element to the racing teams at the Speedway;
many of the drivers have either immediate or extended family working
with them. This seemed to raise the stakes in some races; it wasn't
just one guy racing against another — it was entire families
vying for week-long superiority.)
"I live for it," says Brad Kocks when I ask him about
auto racing. "It's an addiction, just like any drug ... there's a
science to it, and it just hooks you." Team Kocks' current car, which
is orange and sports number 24, took Brad months to build, along with
"a lot of Keystone Light."
The car is a member of the "IMC Modified" class, which
put it in the middle category, speedwise, of the three types of cars
racing that day. There were also "Sportsman" category cars and "360
Sprint" cars, which look nothing like the other two types and go much
faster and shoot impressive flames behind them.
Because I wouldn't know an IMC Modified from a GMC
Jimmy, I feel like a fool as I talk shop with Kocks. Obviously motor-proficient,
he goes on about brake ratios and weight distribution and the limitations
of a factory-built chassis, gesturing with grease- and nicotine-stained
fingers as I nod like a trained monkey. Other pit guys scurry around,
attending to business, but he patiently discusses the car he built
and his little brother, who races it.
"Jason amazes me," he says, shaking his head and grinning.
"I used to race, but once he got started on it, I could just tell
he was better. First time his whole life he's ever been better than
me at something, and it's racing cars." Part of me thinks Brad is
just hyping his brother because that's what good older brothers do,
but Jason will take first place later that night, displaying the same
skill he employed to win 10 straight weeks in 1999, when he was track
champion.
Of course, not everyone goes to a race to see crisp,
skilled driving. On Saturday night, wrecks tended to get a bigger
reaction from the grandstands than one car passing another, even though
the only crashing I saw was decidedly unspectacular — the cars
involved were able to limp off by themselves. My own, personal method
for picking out the best driver went as follows:
- Look at the cars racing one another.
- Find the one in front at the end of the race.
- That guy's a hell of a driver and should be interviewed.
My method failed me early in the evening, however,
when I spotted a purple and green car that posted a fast time during
time trials (one-car-at-a-time races that are used to determine who
gets to race in the "Trophy Dash," which is not the big race
for the evening but rather sort of a preliminary race before the "heats"
begin … hell, I don't know — they have time trials at
the Cottage Grove Speedway, and the guy in the purple car had a fast
time).
Except the guy in the car turned out to be a woman.
Melissa Yates, from Roseburg, who drives in the 360 Sprint class,
wherein flames shoot out from underneath the car and the engine alone
costs between $16,000 and $20,000. A woman in the grandstands had
mentioned Yates earlier, along with the fact that she's "cute as a
button," but I hadn't made the connection with the ultra-macho car
that was tearing around the track. Yates is tiny, just out of high
school — and yes, she is more attractive than your average racer
— but she drives like a felon who's just been spotted cruising
past the precinct station.
"I've been racing go-carts since I was 10," she says.
"I just love the speed. It's a rush." She has two older brothers,
neither of whom have ever been interested in racing, and a father
who loves the sport. Her other car — the one that doesn't sport
a 360 cubic-centimeter engine that runs on alcohol and a steering
wheel you have to detach just to get in the seat — is a Honda
Civic. She has never been pulled over for speeding.
It is around here when I experience Profound and Total
Failure as a journalist. I'm so busy getting answers about the switches
and dials inside her macho purple car that I neglect to ask about
the pair of rubber (or plastic — see, she would know the answer
… bad, bad, bad) testicles she has mounted on the rear of her
vehicle, amply displayed for opposing drivers or anyone else who's
watching. It appears that hair stubble has been hand-drawn on the
surrogate nuts for a more authentic look. Why or how this decision
was made I know not — Yates is a female racer, and there's a
scrotum swinging from her racecar, and that's all I've got.
This will come as no surprise, but auto racing in
Cottage Grove is a male-dominated sport, by which I mean there were
very few women in pit crews, and Yates was the only female driver
I found. Testosterone prevails at all times; for example, when Brad
Kocks (see?) gives me tips on racing, he says, "You gotta pretend
your dick's between your foot and the gas pedal when you're coming
out of the turns. You gotta be real gentle. I guess you could
say an egg, but … " he trails off, shrugging. In the
pits, dick trumps egg, and that's just the way it is.
In the grandstands, however, Barbara Tennison reigns
supreme. She covers racing for the Cottage Grove Sentinel,
among other publications, and she is the ultimate authority on the
goings-on at the track. She has missed four nights in 14 years. She
is the woman who favorably compared Melissa Yates with a button.
"This is like a religion for me," says Tennison. "The
families, over the years, and the closeness everyone has … it's
just great. There are mothers who always know where their boys are
on Saturday nights because of this."
Indeed, "family" is the word that keeps popping up
throughout the evening, and it isn't an empty one. Children are running
around everywhere, and the entire crowd is much more close-knit than
one would expect at such a large event. A cynic would say that there
was something vaguely inbred about the entire scene, but he would
be taking a cheap and superficial angle. Which was exactly what I
was doing for the first few hours. Prepared to hate the Cottage Grove
Speedway and all it represents, I was doing a good job of keeping
the Smirk Factor high, until I ran into Ray Hanke.
Hanke drives a banged-up IMC Modified car, and maintains
it, and "sweeps the garage floor and everything else." Team Hanke
has one member; he is 59 years old. His car is number 49 because that's
how old he was when he started racing it. He is affable and straightforward
and impossible to make fun of.
"When I was in the seventh grade, I was reading at
the second-grade level, and they put me in a special ed class," he
says when I ask him how he became interested in racing. "And the teacher
had me pick out a book to read at the library — hell, I'd never
read a whole book before – and the one I picked out was
called Gentlemen, Start Your Engines. It was about the Indianapolis
500, and it was thick, you know. It was by Wilbur Shaw."
This occurred six years before Hanke graduated from
high school ("we drink wine, we drink whiskey, we're the class of
1960") and he can still recall the author's name. It took something
that blatant to make me realize something this basic: Auto racing
is not a matter of recreation to many people, at least the ones who
come to Cottage Grove; it is a lifestyle, sometimes a calling,
and one of the myriad ways personal freedom manifests itself. As Barbara
Tennison pointed out, it's a community — but more than that,
it constitutes an implicit agreement. A choice, somewhere along the
line, is made to throw one's lot in with the racing crowd, to accept
the basic tenets of Speed and Steel and put what's left in the backseat.
Hippies have drum circles. Race fans have motor ovals.
This choice, this car-crowd, is neither good nor bad,
and it's embarrassing to admit I thought I could make that sort of
call. Aspects of such a community can be categorized — for example,
the smell of burger grease combining with race fuel smells like Grimmest
Death (bad) while the sight of hundreds of people happily coalescing
under a common interest and pristine Oregon sunset is stunning in
its beauty (good). But ultimately, the goings-on at the Cottage Grove
Speedway are grounded in a sort of hunger that transcends judgment,
because such hunger is inevitable. The urgency that originally drove
people to converge, to nod in agreement, is the same force that fills
the Speedway on Saturday nights — and coffee houses during open-mic
sessions, and Elks Lodge Picnics, and gardening societies, and Mass.
It is just one more manifestation. Belonging will always belong.
So, yeah, it was a gorgeous summer evening in Cottage
Grove, and I escaped pit-violence by scoffing at the notion that anyone
would want the Speedway shut down. But I didn't realize I was telling
the truth, not right away. It's reasonable to picture the county putting
additional limitations on noise or space or time — there are
rules, and complaints, and of course lawyers. What's absurd is to
imagine the oval disappearing. It's made of people as much as it is
dirt.
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